One of the most surprising things I gleaned from the commentary track of The Holy Mountain was that Alejandro Jodorowsky had his first LSD experience only halfway through filming the movie. Since the first part features Jesus eating his own face (thousands of times over) and frogs and lizards dressed as Incas and conquistadores, I think it's safe to say that that prohibition would not've stopped him from making something completely weird.

And I think that Dune, as it is, is so complex and multi-dimensional that any film can but hope to capture only one limited intersection on its two-dimensional screen. Once you accept that, Lynch and Jodo's escapades become much easier to live with.

Naïve mind wrote:And I think that Dune, as it is, is so complex and multi-dimensional that any film can but hope to capture only one limited intersection on its two-dimensional screen.

Maybe, but taking acid is not necessarily the thing to do for that, not everyone is cut out to deal with it.Come on, the Emperor a double being shitting in a golden toilet? (from memory)I for myself think that it is possible, the question is that the money necessary to pull something like that off is also the main obstacle, since the underlying message is not really what the big money studios usually go for. ("what? The hero's not a hero and they do drugs to live longer?No way man, no way...")

Frank Herbert wrote:I get asked a specific question a lot of times, if the settings, the scenes that I saw in David’s film match my original imagination, the things I projected in my imagination. I must tell you that some of them do, precisely. Some of them don’t, and some of them are better.

Frank Herbert wrote:When you’re doing a film from the written word, you’re translating into a different language. It’s as though you’re translating from English into Swahili. The visual language is a different language.

Freakzilla wrote:Maybe anything can be translated be something is always lost.

I completely agree with that, since translation and editing are my job.The hope would be a new media would allow to express new meanings, not add silly details.

Translation is a tough task, even from English to French, so translating from the written word to a screen is even tougher.But if you look at what Peter Jackson did with LOtR, even if it had flaws, was still (in my opinion)a perfect example of what I meant.

There's been some talk about the "Jodorowsky's Dune" documentary by Frank Pavich that played at Cannes earlier this year, but I can't find a dedicated thread for it. This seemed as good a place as any to post about it, then.

I just came across an article (in French) that talks about what's going on with it. The film contains extensive shots of the storyboards that Jean "Moebius" Giraud made, which, according to director and fan Nicholas Winding Refn, give a clear sense of what the movie would have been like. But apparently, lawyers for Jean Giraud's widow accused the film of having "counterfeited" Moebius' storyboards, and had police seize the copies of the film during the festival! (All the more bizarre because the producers had cleared the material with the film's producer Michel Seydoux, who owns it, with Giraud before his death, and with his widow after it. Nor have they made specific complaints or legal demands.)

This legal dispute has kept the documentary from being shown or distributed further, but in September the plaintiffs have to show cause, and the producers are hopeful that the case will be dismissed or they'll be able to find some accommodation.

Weird, eh? I wonder if this is about them having turned some of the storyboards into animatics.

Edit: Looks like the documentary is touring a bunch of different film festivals, picking up awards and rave reviews everywhere it goes. Apparently it will get a wider release in early 2014. I came across another French article with some more pictures of the storyboards: L'Express